I Just Received The Most German Wedding Gift Of All Time, Part Of A Car Engine

My friend Andreas and his wife Josi are two of the finest people I’ve ever known, in part, because back in 2020 they bought me a diesel, manual 1994 Chrysler Voyager. This van was my pandemic project, and it is without question the most asked-about project I’ve ever undertaken — probably because lots of people had nothing but time during the pandemic, so they watched me fix and road-trip a rare minivan through Europe. Anyway, roughly two weeks ago the couple flew to California bearing the most absurdly German gift ever: a cylinder head from a Chrysler minivan just like mine, except this wasn’t just a cylinder head. This was the most German gift ever.

I’ll admit that I was quite shocked when Andy told me at my wedding that he had brought me a cylinder head as a gift. “You dragged a head all the way from Germany?!’ I exclaimed. “You have to show me this.”

When he did, he revealed a legendary VM Motori “425” engine cylinder head — one of four individual heads used on diesel engines found in Chrysler minivans (like mine);  Jeep Grand Cherokees and Cherokees; Range Rovers; Alfa Romeos; and various industrial implements.

The engine is mounted to a beautifully bent stainless steel stand featuring laser-etched writing. Clearly this was professionally done, and I don’t even want to think about how much this must have cost Andreas.

But, for some reason, I seem to have forgotten that Andreas is a German engineer. He’s also extremely cheap when it comes to car-things (his negotiation skills are second to none; how he got my minivan for 500 Euros is beyond me). There was no way he was going to pay someone else to build this gift when he could just do it himself. So that’s what he did.

“First I modeled a rough representation of the cylinder head with the correct bolt pattern, weight and rough center of gravity,” he told me.”Then I designed the stand and simulated different sheet metal thicknesses in order to make sure that it wouldn’t sag forward but compresses near perfectly vertically under load in Z direction (“gravity”). I ordered a piece of 2mm stainless steel, rounded the corners with a bandfile and brushed the surface (it had some major storage marks).”

Andreas then told me that he has a friend with a laser engraver (as all Germans do), and that apparently such machines struggle to etch dark enough on stainless steel. Apparently there’s a special solvent you can buy to help darken the etching on stainless steel, but that solvent ain’t cheap, so Andreas had to get resourceful.

“For the laser engraving I first used some scrap stainless to try out some settings. The matrix patterns in the pictures are different movement speed and laser power settings. After I read that there is a spray that you can buy to increase the contrast, that is quite expensive, I noticed that the main ingredient is MoS2, which is a main component of some rust solvents so I just used that for a fraction of the price and it worked beautifully.”

“So I used 90% power and 5mm/s with rust solvent for the text and 50% power and 20mm/s without rust solvent on the logo to get this blueish hue. The logo I found online and converted it to a DXF.” That’s a CAD file, and of course Andreas had to do some stress calculations “with focus on deformation characteristics and less on actual stability…2mm is pretty strong.”

“The font of the text is an OpenType-font called Microgramma D Extended Bold which is a near perfect match for the original “VOYAGER” badge on Krassler,” Andreas explained, going on to tell me he had some trouble dealing with the machine’s lack of a clear coordinate system, though lots of measurements and dry runs made it so that he managed to etch the perfect font in just the right places.

“All this concentration in that direction led to the slip through of the Chrylser mistype, which I only noticed after the about 6h of engraving.” Chrysler, Chrylser, I can barely tell the difference looking at what I just typed; it’s fine!

“Then I [bent] it because I was afraid of marking it in the edge bench. Unfortunately it was too big for the bench, which led to a radius in the vertical section (where the title is written) which I had to readjust by clamping it down and throwing my body on it until the angles would line up as intended.” What Andreas means here is that he actually had to use his body to bend the steel!

Andreas then printed a template to get the bolt holes exactly right, as you can see above. He ended up ruining a bunch of drill bits in the process.

“Then I cleaned the used cylinder head with a shitton of carb cleaner, sanded some of the really dirty parts and clear coated it to encapsulate the rest of the dirt. After that I used a lot of washers and a double nut to secure it in place, as the threading didn’t reach all the way down and I couldn’t cut them myself further. After all of this was finished I had to get it into my suitcase somehow in a way that it wouldn’t take damage on the way and wouldn’t annihilate anything else in it’s path (I was worried about my suit for the wedding; it’s about 15lbs!). From there it was lot’s of praying that my suitcase would survive and the border agents wouldn’t handle it rough on inspection.”

It’s absolutely beautiful, and I can’t believe he did this himself. That eBay cylinder head is just beautifully cleaned, the steel plaque is bent just right, the engraving blew my mind, and I love the soft “feet” at the bottom. I will say, it does seem to reach some kind of resonance when you touch it, so it could use a shock absorber, but as long as there’s no earthquake, it’ll be fine; everyone knows there are no earthquakes in California!